“We were vacationing in Florida. My husband and I are both active-duty Army. I was 35 weeks pregnant when we flew for one last vacation as a family of 3. I had fallen forward on my belly. I was placed on a gurney, in full uniform, and wheeled through the ER. Little did we know, our little man was about to make a big entrance!”
‘We should talk delivery options.’ My response? ‘Um, excuse me?’ My husband’s phone got the call at 10:53.’: Active-duty Army woman gives birth unexpectedly while on vacation
‘I gave my 10-year-old a math test. He spent nearly an hour on it. He worked each problem with intense concentration.’: Mom urges ‘children are so much more than the box we try to mold them into’
“And then, with a deep breath, he handed it to me to be graded. I quickly worked my way through the test and calculated his score. Immediately his eyes filled with tears.”
‘Stop pushing!,’ my doctor said. ‘No time to wait. His heart rate keeps dropping with every push, I cannot let this keep happening.’
“The epidural I was given hours ago never worked, I was feeling every intense pain throughout my labor. I clung to his words.”
‘The doctor has my husband bend over, takes one look and says the words you don’t EVER want to hear. WHAT HAS HAPPENED? We were hiking just weeks ago.’: Woman shocked by husband’s cancer diagnosis, ‘We were so in love’
“We came home and I made him scrambled eggs and toast for dinner. He fell asleep on the chair. About 8:30 or so, I thought WOW he’s been asleep for a while now, and I tried to wake him up.”
‘I’ll never forget walking into the hospital on a cold January night, preparing to give birth for the second time. The nurses buzzed me through the doors, but the atmosphere was anything but celebratory.’
“Strength was required to face the inevitable questions of ‘is this your first pregnancy?’ Or, ‘how many children do you have?’”
‘She’s too confident,’ they whisper to each other. If only they knew she leads with self-assurance to overcome her debilitating self-doubt and social anxiety.’
“‘She’s too unkempt. Kids are not an excuse for looking so ragged,’ they added. ‘She talks and shares her opinion too much.'”
‘Just as I was attempting to fall asleep, I heard my oldest son whimpering in his room. This is so unusual that I raced down the hallway to check on him.’
“I cried a little bit thinking about my dad and how much I miss him and wish he were here. I fell asleep for a bit, but a weird dream jolted me awake. There were some creaks. Then, there was silence.”
‘Nothing prepared me for my wife’s cesarean. NOTHING. Birth was the most frightening thing I’d ever seen.’: Husband praises ‘stoic, strong, powerful, dedicated’ wife for ‘bringing children into the world’
“Reaching from a gaping hole in my beautiful wife’s stomach was the head of a bloody, powder white, child-like creature. I recall Mel lying naked in front of the doctors; her stomach like a deflated balloon. But nothing shocked me as much as the next day. She was the most badass person I knew.”
‘I go from loving him to hating his guts over a period of 24 hours. I never thought that would ever happen to us. Ever.’: Wife talks ‘seeing the bright side’ in your marriage and falling back in love
“Some people say they loved each other MORE after having children. I think that’s surely got to be a crock.”
‘When people ask me why I would ever do something like this, I have a simple answer – ‘I have a uterus, it works, I’m not using it, so why not let someone else who doesn’t have that same ability?’
“I was supposed to be the one to bring them fertility, and yet here we were, almost a year later and nothing.”